The House by the Sea Page 3

  Bramble, who is not a lap cat, now every night at about one creeps up and lies on my chest, kneading me firmly (and sometimes painfully) while she purrs extremely loudly. The slow taming of this wild creature has been fascinating.

  Wednesday, December 4th

  THIS IS the latest I’ve ever planted bulbs but Raymond finally did dig a little bed over the wall and it seemed too bad not to use it, so I bought eighteen tulips this morning and set them in this afternoon under a pure blue sky—it was cold! One understands how animals scurry about preparing for winter. I have been doing the same thing for weeks, getting the storm windows put up, yesterday my snow tires, getting in extra seed for the birds (sunflower at $15.50 for 50 pounds is staggering!), firewood. And today I paid $211.00 for the November oil for the furnace. I tremble a little, for if I don’t write a book a year it just wouldn’t be possible to live here.

  It is beautiful up here in my study in the afternoons, the sky over the sea reflecting the sunset and the great arc of the ocean all around me. In the mornings I have to pull the curtains, for the light dazzles.

  Thursday, December 5th

  TEMPERATURE 10° above this morning.

  I have a leaden feeling when I wake up and need to shake myself awake like a dog. But the lead is in my mind, of course. It is not only the coming on of winter, but the coming on of old age that I shore up against these days. At all ages we are learning how precarious life is, as it slowly penetrates consciousness that we live in a dying civilization. It was dreadfully borne in on me when the UN allowed Arafat, a holster showing under his shirt, to speak, and so sanctified the most brutal terrorist organization in the world. At that moment something went out of us all in the West. Trust that the generality of nations would stand, at least theoretically, for justice under law? “The Age of Terror,” Paul Johnson calls this one in the New Statesman (November 29). Now the truth is out after The Age of Anxiety when we felt vaguely uncomfortable and alarmed. Now the truth is out—there is no court of higher appeal, no public generality to express revolt. We are all in the same boat and the boat is commanded by thugs.

  Johnson says,

  “Here we come to the essence of the argument. No state throughout history has had completely clean hands. What marks the progress of civilization is the systematic recognition of laws, the identification and punishment of crime, and the reprobation of the offender. A civilized society is one which sees evil in itself and provides means to eliminate it, where the voice of conscience is active. The horrific record of Britain’s indiscriminate bombing of Germany is in part redeemed by the protests of Bishop Bell of Chichester. The brutalization of Vietnam by the United States is balanced by the critical millions who eventually brought it to an end. We need not despair at the devastating events of our times so long as we retain the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, between law and disorder, between justice and crime, and proclaim these distinctions from the roof-tops.

  “The tragedy of the UN is that the distinctions have been first blurred, then wholly abandoned; and that its judgements are now delivered not according to any recognized set of principles, however inadequate, but solely in response to the pressures of political and racial groupings. Racialism is condemned in South Africa but applauded in Uganda; and the fruits of aggression are denied or blessed according to the race and political leanings of those to whom they accrue. Thus the UN has become a kind of kangaroo court; far from protecting international order, it undermines it. Not even the wretched League of Nations gave a welcome and a platform to Hitler.”

  It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.

  One might even make a distinction between terrorism for an ideal or a dream such as the PLO and that which we condone here at home, violence for no reason, as a game or a way of snatching a few dollars. Are we in the West on the way out partly because we have provided our people with almost everything except an ideal?

  Tuesday, December 10th

  IT HAS BEEN unseasonably warm for the last few days … and today again, a romantic sunrise, clouds edged in crimson just before the sun rose between two banks of soft gray. Now at half past nine the sea is that ineffably calm satin blue and the clouds have vanished. Purity and peace.

  I am going to Nelson and to Wellesley over three nights at the end of this week, and haven’t paused to write because it’s a great rush to get all the presents packed and ready for the Nelson neighbors. I have baked about twenty dozen cookies, six different kinds, in the last three days. I burned half the first batch—awful! But then I began to achieve confidence and all went well. What fun it is to fill the boxes, and to feel more or less ready at last.

  I have meant to record that by chance I have had two moving evocations of my mother lately. When I read poems at Westbrook College in Portland, a charming middle-aged woman at the reception came to tell me that she had had my mother as teacher of applied design at Winsor School. She said they all looked forward to those afternoons as such fun and what a great teacher my mother had been. They made simple geometric designs painted in brilliant colors on ice cream boxes and wooden bowls; the results were beautiful and various. Here again is proof that giving a child a form to play with releases something—an unfashionable view these days. Yet space has to be defined in some way in every art, it seems to me.

  The other evocation of EMS was a letter from Alice Ekern, who was a neighbor in the apartment house at 10 Avon Street where we lived in the first years in Cambridge. She had just read my piece in House and Garden where I speak of mother’s making me such exquisite clothes for my dolls each Christmas and reminded me of a white silk smocked dress that had been mine and that mother gave Alice for her little daughter. “And,” the letter tells me, “my Babs still assembles every Christmas the Belgian crèche, the little handmade animals and house. As she assembles this, as I did before Babs, each piece is a felt blessing.”

  Soon I shall start again a book of portraits that I’ve been accumulating over the past years—one is a portrait of my mother. Perhaps at last I am ready to write it again. I have always abandoned it in despair, I think because in some ways my mother was a tragic figure; yet what she communicated to all who knew her was pure joy, and that was her particular genius. But how to make it clear?

  Wednesday, December 18th

  YESTERDAY after the gale of two days, high wind—so high I could hardly open the door to let Bramble in—the sun came out and there was that washed blue sky that so often follows a storm. But the seas were still running high and when I walked down with Tamas it was glorious to watch one great comber after another sweep in and break on the rocks.

  Earlier I set out to get the tree … the place in Portsmouth where I got last year’s was not functioning and on the advice of a gas station attendant, I drove on to Greenland and paid $12.00 for a fresh healthy beautiful tree. Raymond helped me cut it so the star won’t hit the ceiling and we left it in the cool of the garage, upright in its stand. I’ll bring it in tomorrow; I go down to Concord to fetch Judy on Friday. So Christmas is really on the way now and I must help it along with a lot of notes this morning. Today calm seas, blue sky, and really too warm for the season.

  Christmas Day

  I THOUGHT when I woke at 6:30 that there was thick fog, but then I realized that it was snow falling fast, already an inch or two on the ground, and lying in ermine richness on the pine trees … a perfect white Christmas! There is no wind. I ran down to get our breakfast ready and tucked Judy up in my big bed in her new vermilion wrapper. For how many years have we had Christmas breakfast in bed and opened our stockings? I opened the French door in my bedroom so we could look right out into the snow and it was rather like being in a tent, snug inside and all that lovely whiteness falling, falling around us. That wonderful present-imaginer, Maureen Connally, had sent a package of things for our stockings. Tamas waited patiently for a bite of toast. (Bra
mble had suddenly leapt out the window at around five and had not yet come in.) Maureen had even remembered that in Belgium one of the traditional things is a marzipan pig, and there he was in my stocking, also two velvet and “pailletted” black-and-white pandas.

  After a while I went down and tidied up the library, a chaos of wrappings and ribbons (we had opened presents on Christmas Eve). I don’t believe we have ever had such a perfect tree, about six feet tall and beautifully wide-branched all around. Yesterday was a rather up-and-down day, in fact, a day of violent mood swings, but the sweetest half hour was when Raymond, the handyman as he calls himself (he is really a gardener, but does many odd jobs for me because he is so thoughtful and kind) and his sister came for tea and to exchange our presents. Both have a twinkle in their eyes, and we tease each other. Raymond teases me because I am impatient and I tease him because he gets things done always at the eleventh hour when I am about to have “a nervous breakdown,” as he says. I guess one of my best Christmas presents was his rhyme on his Christmas card. He began these communications when I first came here and they arrive now and then and make me smile with pleasure and the sense of belonging that he, more than anyone, has given me. Here it is:

  The roses are hilled and the flower beds covered

  By the handyman whom you discovered

  Hanging around like a long lost soul

  When you took up residence at Wild Knoll.

  The garden is tilled, the raspberry patch made ready

  By this same guy who is so slow but steady.

  If all gets done wouldn’t it be great?

  Then this old bear could hibernate.

  What’s that? You say it’s Dec. twenty-four?

  Yawn—Hohum—So sorry—Snore …

  T.B.W.S.T.C.

  I couldn’t figure out the signature, and finally he told me that it was (of course!) “The bear who slept through Christmas.” One of our jokes has been about his need to hibernate once the autumn chores are done.

  But I have such sadness about Judy! She is going from me, from us all, little by little, and I feel helpless and often terribly irritated by her repeating the same phrase over and over as she does. Now, as I write, she is resting in bed with Bramble at her feet, and Tamas lying on the floor beside her, and we are listening together to the Mozart Piano Concerto, Number 21. It is marvelous at last to hear music in this house.…

  Tuesday, December 31st

  JUDY LEFT a few days ago. For twenty-four hours I felt her absence keenly. Then solitude and all its riches came back to me and I have been writing letters and cards and slowly diminishing the chaos on my desk. It’s a season when one gets spread out almost too thin in too many human directions, but come January first I am determined to batten myself down, tighten up, go inward. I feel the day must be marked by a change of rhythm, by some quiet act of self-determination and self-assertion. Everyone earns such a day after the outpourings of Christmas. We are overextended. Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge.

  Every day lately I have woken to pure skies and a wide sunrise, cloudless bands of deep orange at the horizon, and every day I have been surprised by the moment when the sun turns my bureau deep rose and lights up a bowl of paper white narcissus. I see them twice, the second time reflected in the mirror; it’s a moment of pure magic.

  In the middle of Christmas I had a long letter from Eugenia about Le Gallienne (stimulated by my piece on her genius in a recent issue of Forum).

  “I also re-read Le G’s At 33, and her preface to Hedda. Incidentally sometime when we meet we must talk about Ibsen’s women (Anima) as there are bits of the same in all, Hilda Wangel, etc. Le G. is an extraordinary woman. To have achieved what she did at her age is unbelievable. Of course she should have returned to Europe then. It is terrible that so few people know of her here. When I read her preface to Hedda I realized why she says she does not need a psychiatrist. She is quite right. She does not. She is so in touch with every bit of the dramatis personae that she has found and joined a lot of herself. Either these bits were already conscious and became more so by her acting or else they penetrated her as she acted and she saw them. That is really what Jung means when he talks of individuation: knowing all (or as many as possible) of your bits, reactions, responses, different depths, counterpoints, etc. Like all the Great she is tremendously humble because she knows she is a channel for something other than herself, and tremendously arrogant, because she knows she has the channel …”

  Then Eugenia speaks of Judy, “Dear, Modiglianish, always there, sensitive, receptive Judy. She was so wonderfully kind and accepting in those years of pain and mess. Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person. I do cherish her so; can one maintain the image of love when so much has gone?”

  I guess the answer to that question is, yes, because when one has lived with someone for years, as I did with Judy, something quite intangible is there, as though in the bloodstream, that no change in her changes.

  Wednesday, January 1st, 1975

  A WARM DULL day with wet snow falling … I was woken at half past six by the ploughs, grating and roaring to break the crust and deice the roads. I feel exhilarated, despite the weather. I’m a fish back in his element, water or solitude. And the day begins slowly without pressure, my only task to walk the dog at noon. Last night I put up a calendar and found January to have as its quotation a familiar one from E. M. Forster:

  “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” Howard’s End.

  As so often happens, the truncated version “Only connect” really does not give Forster’s meaning and I was forcibly struck by the last sentence. Off and on since Sybille Bedford’s admirable biography of Aldous Huxley came out I have been pondering what it is about Huxley that did not convince; surely not that he was “a modern saint,” as Sybille believes. For what he did, it seems to me, was to keep the beast and the monk separate, so that he never could function as a whole human being and therefore the work is sometimes intellectually satisfying, but never touches the whole of a reader. Out of immense knowledge he was able to create only a fragmented world, a world close to Hell and never close to Heaven. Love really doesn’t exist in it. Sex is what drives the plot, and the plot only a device, an armature on which to hang intellectual theories and concepts. But why does this make me feel angry and frustrated? After all, much that Aldous has to say is true, and his foretellings of disaster especially so. We have to live in the Hell he foresaw where the population explosion would threaten civilization as we know it.

  I suppose I am angry because he offends the artist in me at every turn and dismays the human being in me. I do not believe that the saint is detached. My saints are people like Simone Weil whose thirst for God became an anguish, and whose intellect never led her into a sense of superiority (which means into cleverness), and/or St. Francis who was absolutely wholehearted in his attachment to God as witnessed in every living thing. Detachment which springs from an inability to love is quite another thing, for it stays close to cynicism. One way or another one has to fall on one’s knees. This Aldous never could do. Total eclecticism works neither for art nor for religion—at some point one has to make choices, one has to shut out the critical self and take the leap.

  But Aldous Huxley does remain as a wonderful exemplar of courage and intelligence in dealing with disability—being willing to learn a discipline (for his eyes), for instance, making use to the limit of all his powers, asking the impossible as far as producing as much as he contracted to produce year after year to keep solvent. He had valiance and, perhaps even harder, the genius to achieve balance. He did not, like his brother Julian, ever break down as far as we know. I never knew him personally, and
all who did know him loved him. So it is clear that I do not do him justice.

  Why am I angry and ruffled about all this? Because in London in October I had tea with Julian and Juliette Huxley. Their son, Francis, was also there with his new book, The Way of the Sacred. Julian is very old now, old and self-absorbed. But thirty-five years ago our lives touched closely, as did mine with Juliette after World War II. I loved them both passionately. And now I felt such a chill in the air, and something sad and confined, ungenerous and bitter about it all. Julian telling the same old jokes, anecdotal jokes that simply short-circuit any conversation and so often are put-downs. Juliette, furious about the attacks on Lady Ottoline, furious against the Bloomsberries … though, after all, it was D. H. Lawrence and Aldous who caricatured Lady Ottoline in print. It was as though time had stopped still in that room and more than a person was ebbing away.

  For when I knew them they were entrancing. They opened doors for me into every kind of joy, from the wild joys of picnics at Whipsnade, to their marvelous parties where I met Koteliansky, James Stephens, Kenneth Clark, so many other people who became my friends (not Clark, whom I saw only once), and they were generous to this young American nobody, generous and welcoming. I certainly in no way deserved all that they gave me. Like Aldous and Maria (as we learn from Sybille Bedford), they made a magic world around them. Being with them was endlessly exciting; everything—art, politics, science—could be discussed and was, with both erudition and humor. Where has it all gone?

  But I meant to speak a little of 1974. For me it has been a marvelous year, full of surprises, not the least to find myself suddenly famous, not very famous, but more at ease with the world and myself than ever before because the work is getting through at long last. I enjoyed being on television three or four times. Nice things happened, as the day when a beautiful young man came for tea because he had read Kinds of Love, came bringing a bunch of roses from his grandmother, and a Belgian cake from his aunt, and there was great sweetness in learning that all these people wanted to thank me for one book or another, people of different generations. Morgan Mead and I had a long talk and have become friends.